Month: January 2011

Although I am a git and DVCS true believer, I still deal with SVN. In Visual Studio this usually means I use AnkhSVN. For anyone paying for the VisualSVN client, I really think you should evaluate this tool. Its Visual Studio Integration is superb and I’ve had no usability problems in recent versions.

One thing about it annoyed me was caused by it integrating too well with Visual Studio. That problem was it is the display of line numbers on the editor screen. I setup Visual Studio to display line numbers in editor windows, and this has the side effect of displaying line numbers in the log message editor of the commit screen. I find this annoying. I don’t need line numbers for my commit log files and they take up precious screen real estate.

Luckily I found a solution. Apparently, in the current version of AnkhSVN, the commit editor has its own section in the Visual Studio Text editor options. So turning off the line numbers on the commit screen, but not the other editor screens can be done from the Tools | Options menu.

Options|TextEditor|GeneralOptions|TextEditor|Log Messages (AnkhSVN)

After that, the line numbers disappear in the commit dialog.

Its the little things like this that make a software experience truly great.

Originally this was supposed to be an end of year round up. However, two things happened. First, I did not finish it before the end of the year. Secondly, I realized that it would be better to list software I’ve discovered over the past 18 months as opposed to a year, due to various personal events that started in July 2009.

If I had to use one word to describe my relationship with technology in the past 18 months, it would have to be the Russian word Glasnov. That word, refers the open policies adopted by Mikhail Gorbachev that lead to the fall of the Berlin wall and communist Russia. I say this because I’ve used many open source programs for the first time in the past 18 months, and how I work with technology has changed greatly in that time. I therefore decided to present a list of some of the open source packages I think are very important. I’ve broken them up into two groups. The first group is programs I started using after July 2009. The second is programs I’ve been using since before then.

New Programs

The Far Archive Manager is a filemanager originally developed by the author of WinRAR. It was recently made open source. It is a console mode orthodox file manager. I became attracted to Far for its ability to handle large directories and unc paths well. However, I became a true believer because of the plugins. There are plugins for everything. For example, the WinSCP plugin lets you connect remotely to scp and sftp shares, and the 7-zip plugin lets you manage archives as if they were directories. However, there are also plugins for the Service Control Manager and event viewer. The latest version even has UAC elevation integrated, although some plugins, notably the 7-zip one, does not. This means I can run far normally, download something to c:userszippyDownloads in Chrome, and copy it to c:Program Filessomething and I will get a UAC prompt. However, if I download a zip file I cannot copy its contents directly to c:program files.

I’ve never use a clipboard manager before. Then Stan, the founder of this blog, told me to download Ditto. I don’t know how I lived life without it. Ditto keeps a stack of everything you copy to the clipboard. That stack can be accessed by pressing ctrl+`. There are advanced options suck as searching the clipboard stack, but even this most basic mode of operation can make you more productive.

What can I say about MongoDB? I was first introduced to MongoDB at NYPHP on October 27th 2010. On that evening on the 12th floor of 590 Madison Avenue, Kristina Chodorow destroyed everything I held right, holy and just about data storage and management. So I asked a lot of questions during the presentation, and convinced her into coming down to LILUG and LIPHP for encore performances. I decided there was some merit to all this heresy for some cases. However, I didn’t actually use MongoDB until May of 2010. Then on June 3rd Eliot merged my first patch into the MongoDB code base. I’m still not a MongoDB true believer, but it definitely has its purposes, and I recommend all DBAs should walk a mile in its moccasins before hurling brimstone at it.

Contributing to MongoDB forced me to learn git, and for that I am forever greatful. Distributed version control is the way to go, especially for open source projects. Git is a little weird to use, but that is what happens when a Finnish operating system developer writes a version control system. The other thing that happens is you get a VCS that is very fast.

Scons is like make, except its written in python. MongoDB uses scons as its build system. If I were starting a new C/C++ project I’d consider using scons as the build system. I struggle with editing the mongodb Sconstruct file since I don’t know python, but I was able to pick up enough python to be reasonably productive.

I’ve used the PGP SDK in a previous life when I wrote ETL jobs. Recently, I have to generate a feed for someone else to ETL and they wanted it PGP encrypted. I discovered that there was a free, open source alternative to the PGP SDK that was written in C#. This meant I did not have to mess with managed C++ or P/Invoke, in addition to not paying for PGP license.

PHP Manager is a plugin for IIS manager that allows you to manage your PHP installation on IIS. Quite simply, if you run PHP on IIS and you are not using this tool, you’re doing it wrong.

PHPManager lets you load and unload modules as well as edit all your php.ini settings. It also will tell you if you are doing things wrong in your configuration file, such as not setting a time zone. Finally, phpmanager has a “just open my PHP.ini file in notepad” button. I must stress the importance of installing this addin on any IIS server where PHP is installed.

Greenshot is a great Screen Capture utility for windows. It lacks the video capture features of the closed source tool Jing, which I also use, but it cannot be beat for still capture. Greenshot has all the simple image editing you wold want from such an app. You can highlight, crop, obfuscate, and annotate your images. You can then save them or add them to the clipboard. The obfuscating is a great feature because sometimes you want to post a screen shot on your blog or a support forum, and usually there is sensitive information in it, like your companies code or a private email. Before greenshot, I’d fire up gimp to do this. Greenshot streamlines the process greatly.

I’ve been using gmail for years for my personal email. I really never saw a need for a traditional email client. Then I realized I wasn’t backing up my email. So now I install Thunderbird on all my machines and keep it running in the background to backup my gmail account. I also have zindus to backup my google contacts. While I should probably switch to a more lightweight method like fetchmail or mutt, thunderbird serves my needs for now.

One of the cool things about IIS 7.0 and WCF is the ability to serve WCF endpoints with non-http bindings. Naturally, this new feature presents new opportunities for the developer to get frustrated by WCF configuration headaches. This blog post is about one of them.

I was writing a WCF web service that had three endpoints, Json, Soap 1.1, and net.tcp. This services primary purpose was to be the middleware for the mongo database where my applications data was held. In the end, I didn’t need the net.tcp endpoint, making this exercise a complete waste of time. The reasons for my architectural decisions for this app are the subject of another blog post. For now, lets just say if you are supposed to learn more from your failures than your successes, I should get an honorary doctorate for this app.

In the past I’ve mixed soap and net.tcp in EXE hosted WCF services with great success. However, since I’ve yet to find a JSONP endpoint solution for WCF that allows request parameters, I needed to host this in IIS on the same site as my project. So I made a .svc file in my website, added the service dll as a reference, and ran it. I promptly got the the following error:

It was a bit frustrating to find the solution, but I did eventually. In IIS manager you have to select Advanced Settings in the applications Application folder, or website if the app is running at the root. In the advanced settings dialog is an option called Enabled Protocols. It probably contains the value http or http,https. You simple have to append ,net.tcp to the current value.

After that, everything works.

As an epilogue to this adventure, since I forgot to take all the screenshots needed for this blog article at work, I ended up having to make an example project to reproduce the error at home. As such I took an older example WCF project I wrote called EchoService and adding a website host to it in addition to the exe host. This improved version of EchoService can be found at the justaprogrammer github org. Feel free to use this service s the basis for any WCF related instructional materials. The code is licensed under the very permissive MIT license.

This post is the announcement of the justaprogrammer fork of JsonViewer, an excellent codeplex project whose maintainer has not logged into codeplex in a while and has not seem my patches.

JsonViewer is a suite of three .NET tools that visual render JSON via .NET WinForms. These tools are:

JsonView: the standalone EXE form.

JsonVisualizer: A Visual Studio Debugging visualizer

JsonInspector: An inspector for the popular and excellent debugging proxy Fiddler.

This fork started as a result of me scratching some very small and specific itches I will describe below.

Obtaining source and binaries

I have created a github project for this fork in the justaprogrammer github organization. There is one download there currently. More will be added periodically and news will appear on this blog.

Human readable DateTime display

I originally used the Fiddler inspector to debug WCF services I wrote with JSON endpoints. It worked very well for this. However, some of my response contracts had DataTime properties. These were rendered as /Date(SECONDS_SINCE_1970)/. This format was pretty useless in that I had to copy the value to a javascript console like firebug to get a human readable date. After I got no responses on my bug report, I did a bit of twiddling until the output was human readablke.

Request Inspector

Since I was debugging WCF services, both my requests and my responses were JSON formatted strings. However, JsonViewer only implemented a response inspector. Once again, I filed a ticket, saw no response, did a little bit of refactoring and I had a request and response viewer.

The future

I have an experimental branch where I got JsonViewer to build against the latest version of Newtonsoft.Json.dll. I got it working, but I lost the DateTime formatting in the process. Also, code needs some major refactoring use the new version of the library optimally. Finally, I hope to attract feature requests and code from existing fans of JsonViewer until the point where the original maintainer becomes involved in the original project.